Meeting Details

Motion of an ideal particle ("a billiard ball") inside a bounded plane domain with the usual elastic reflection law `"the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection'' is one of the simplest mechanical problems and attempts to describe this motion lead both to remarkable open problems and to connections with a variety of deep mathematical theories. For example, it is still not known whether inside any triangle there is a periodic billiard motion. It is also not known whether there is twice differentiable convex curve such that some billiard motion inside it is dense. In this talk I will give a very brief and elementary introduction to the beauty and complexity of this problem that looks so deceptively simple.